Advantage India, Disadvantage India

Image via WikipediaI first thought in terms of India. An Indian does not need to look far and wide to find poverty. It's right there. It's right there in the backyard. India has the vast majority of the dollar a day, two dollars a day people.

I'd start out by knowing the culture. I'd know the language. And when I say that I mean to say English also, not just Hindi, not just Maithili and Bhojpuri. India is the biggest English speaking country in the world.

And there is the size. I could take the company IPO based just on Bihar. Bihar alone is that big. It would make sense to polish the basic business model in Bihar and then take it to Africa, rather than otherwise.

India is a vibrant democracy, the biggest in the world.

Top Discussion At A Top LinkedIn Microfinance Group

Image via WikipediaA discussion I started a week ago (and kinda forgot about) at a LinkedIn group with over 1200 members has become the top discussion at that group. The group is Microfinance Focus. This activity has made me take a serious look at LinkedIn for the first time. This thing is working, yo.

This has also made me look at India all over again. India was the country I started with in terms of where I wanted to go. But I was advised that the Indian government makes it very hard to bring money into the country. It is much better to start with some middle income country in Latin America. So I am thinking Costa Rica, more recently Paraguay. Much more recently I have been thinking Kenya. But I have had this gnawing feeling that a Bihari needs to be thinking Bihar.

Slumdog Millionaire: A Movie About My People

Raising Money, Building Teams

Rootlessness And The City

Image by joiseyshowaa via FlickrI was born in India. I grew up in Nepal next door. I came to America for college. When I was applying for colleges while in Nepal, I did not have a favorite college in mind. I liked all sorts of colleges. Every prospectus I picked up I absolutely fell in love with. Now I realize what I was really applying for back then was to get into New York City. People who go to all those colleges all end up in New York City.

I have something akin to a PhD in race relations. There is the conscious level of the mind, the subconscious level, and there's deeper stuff. Racial identity can inhabit the mind at several levels. That's what makes a white guy high school drop out detain the top movie star in India for an hour at the New Jersey airport. Your name is Khan? You must be a terrorist.

Libya On My Mind, Libya On Your Mind

Image via WikipediaRight now is a great time to follow me on Twitter. I have been reading up on the Arab democracy movements and sharing the links with abandon. I have also been blogging. My blog posts automatically show up in my Twitter stream.

2011 is 1989. This is big, this is historic. This will be a year to remember. Nothing like this has happened in Arab history ever before.

I am thinking Libya. I am thinking Saudi Arabia. Heck, I am thinking China, and I am thinking Burma.

Pray for Libya. Meditate for Libya. Every ounce of mental energy counts. It does not matter where you are. People braving the streets deserve to be in your thoughts.

And, yes, Iran's time will come all over again. 2009 was not a wasted year. That was dress rehearsal.

Two Events: Global Impact With Social Media, Digital Dumbo

So I am doing the Monday morning thing of opening up the email from Charlie O'Donnell. His weekly events newsletter is the best thing Charlie ever did.

Charlie Bit My Finger

Charlie Bit My Finger

Charlie O'Donnell At His Inspiring Best
The Most Popular Dish In New York: Shake Shack Burger, Madison Square Park
General Assembly: Singing Praises

The top commenter at the blog This Is Going To Be Big has been blocked from leaving comments at the blog. It happened around FourSquare Day last year. I gladly shook Charlie's hand at the FourSquare Day Party completely unaware he had gone ahead and blocked me at his blog not long before that.
Image via Wikipedia
"Life is unfair."
- JFK

No URL Bar: Big Change

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Conceivably Tech: Google May Kill Chrome URL Bar: he elimination of the URL bar, which could be the most significant UI change to the web browser since its invention. ...... aim to increase the viewable space for web and application content. ...... Chrome led the pace, but it is IE9, which has the most efficient UI at this time, in terms of available pixels to web content. ...... The classic navigation version, compact navigation, sidetab navigation as well as a touchscreen version. ...... The compact navigation model would only have one line and place the navigation buttons, a search button, tabs and menus next to each other. The URL bar is gone and the URL of each tab is not visible at all times, but only displayed when a page is loading and when a tab is selected. ...... allow users to open multiple Chrome windows and apply different users to them. For example, if you use multiple Google accounts, you have to sign out/sign in between different accounts. Via multiple profile support you will be able to be signed into different accounts in parallel and use them at the same time – in different browser windows. ........ future Chrome windows will show the Google account name not just in the window when you are on a Google page, but in the browser windows itself next to the window control buttons minimize/maximize/close. ....... If a user closes all Chrome windows and the reopens a window, then the window will assume the identity of the most recently closed window. If a user closes three windows with three different identities and the reopens three windows, the windows would assume the identity of the three identities again

It is great to see Google want to keep innovating in the browser space. Having more real estate when you are browsing helps. Being able to access multiple Google accounts is a big one. It is not unusual for people to have a private Gmail account and also a work account on the Gmail platform these days.

Microfinance: No Substitute For Good Governance

Image via WikipediaDemocracy is basic. I am a firm believer in democracy. The year a country becomes a modern democracy is year one in that country's life. Lack of democracy, bad governance, massive corruption, and civil war are situations that are not within the domain of the microfinance industry. Basic good governance is critical for the microfinance industry to have a playing field where it can start performing, it can start to lift people out of poverty in large numbers.

There is plenty of diversity within the microfinance industry. There are many right ways. And microfinance is not the only tool with which to cure poverty. China has lifted more people out of poverty the past few decades than any other country, and it does not even allow MFIs to come in.

Singularity: I Am Not Convinced

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Time: 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal: Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away...... computers are getting faster faster ...... Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us...... even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction ....... it will be the most important thing to happen to human beings since the invention of language...... He holds 39 patents and 19 honorary doctorates. In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology...... The Singularity Is Near, which was a best seller when it came out in 2005 ..... Bill Gates has called him "the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence." ..... In real life, the transcendent man is an unimposing figure who could pass for Woody Allen's even nerdier younger brother. Kurzweil grew up in Queens, N.Y....... someone who gives 60 public lectures a year..... technological progress happens exponentially, not linearly. ....... Exponential curves start slowly, then rocket skyward toward infinity....... We will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s. By the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. ...... 2045 .... the quantity of artificial intelligence created will be about a billion times the sum of all
Image via Wikipediathe human intelligence that exists today....... Once you decide to take the Singularity seriously, you will find that you have become part of a small but intense and globally distributed hive of like-minded thinkers known as Singularitarians. ....... They think in terms of deep time, they believe in the power of technology to shape history, they have little interest in the conventional wisdom about anything, and they cannot believe you're walking around living your life and watching TV as if the artificial-intelligence revolution were not about to erupt and change absolutely everything........ When you enter their mind-space you pass through an extreme gradient in worldview, a hard ontological shear that separates Singularitarians from the common run of humanity. Expect turbulence....... Proponents of seasteading — the practice, so far mostly theoretical, of establishing politically autonomous floating communities in international waters ........ After artificial intelligence, the most talked-about topic at the 2010 summit was life extension. Biological boundaries that most people think of as permanent and inevitable Singularitarians see as merely intractable but solvable problems. Death is one of them. Old age is an illness like any other, and what do you do with illnesses? You cure them. ....... The mice didn't just get better; they got younger....... damage can be repaired periodically. This is why we have vintage cars. ...... Kurzweil has published two books on his own approach to life extension, which involves taking up to 200 pills and supplements a day. He says his diabetes is essentially cured, and although he's 62 years old from a chronological perspective, he estimates that his biological age is about 20 years younger....... Once hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences arise, armed with advanced nanotechnology, they'll really be able to wrestle with the vastly complex, systemic problems associated with aging in humans....... t many people who are alive today will wind up being functionally immortal....... People invested a lot of personal effort into certain philosophies dealing with the issue of life and death. I mean, that's the major reason we have religion." ........ strong AI or artificial general intelligence, doesn't exist yet. ..... there are things going on in our brains that can't be duplicated electronically no matter how many MIPS you throw at them. The neurochemical architecture that generates the ephemeral chaos we know as human consciousness may just be too complex and analog to replicate in digital silicon...... Multiple biochemical processes create chemical modifications of protein molecules, further diversified by association with distinct structures at defined locations of a cell. The resulting combinatorial explosion of states endows living systems with an almost infinite capacity to store information regarding past and present conditions and a unique capacity to prepare for future events." That makes the ones and zeros that computers trade in look pretty crude. ...... introducing a superior life-form into your own biosphere is a basic Darwinian error....... Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years ..... In Kurzweil's future, biotechnology and nanotechnology give us the power to manipulate our bodies and the world around us at will, at the molecular level. 
Cover via AmazonProgress hyperaccelerates, and every hour brings a century's worth of scientific breakthroughs. We ditch Darwin and take charge of our own evolution. The human genome becomes just so much code to be bug-tested and optimized and, if necessary, rewritten. Indefinite life extension becomes a reality; people die only if they choose to. Death loses its sting once and for all. Kurzweil hopes to bring his dead father back to life...... Within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe. ....... There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops...... Nothing gets old as fast as the future...... Singularitarianism is grounded in the idea that change is real and that humanity is in charge of its own fate and that history might not be as simple as one damn thing after another.

I could run at two miles per hour. I could run at three miles per hour. If you extrapolate that then I should be able to run at 60 miles per hour. But I don't think that is happening.

I have not read enough on the topic, I have not read much at all. So these are my first impressions.

Besides my idea of singularity is end of poverty, a total spread of democracy, universal broadband, things like that.

Larry Wants To Become A Household Name

Image via WikipediaLarry Ellison for a brief period became the richest person in the world, and he very much continues to be one of the richest. But he never became a household name like Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, for that matter. If it is any solace to him, the two Google founders or Eric Schmidt did not become household names either.

The thing about Oracle is the largest database company in the world does background work. Windows is in your face. But the software that processes your credit card transactions stays out of sight.